Navigation

And it's all your state of mind

Winnowill update

Emerging, finally, from the long hard slog of rebuilding my music collection in iTunes. fleetfootmike is a lifesaver; the recommendation of the Senuti tool made this entire process a lot less of a pain in the ass. I still had to proceed an album at a time through the collection as I pulled it off the iPod, though. The tool had a few interesting ideas about what to name albums and/or individual tracks, and so I had to doublecheck what was happening when I pulled them all back into the library. But doing it an album at a time rather than a song at a time still made it a lot faster. So thanks very much, Mike!

There were only a few casualities of the entire affair. I had to re-rip the new Heather Alexander/Alexander James Adams duo album, WinterTide, but fortunately that was easily done. A few free tracks I'd pulled down off of iTunes thanks to those free song cards they were handing out in November have vanished, but eh, I can live without those. None of my purchased music was lost, and most importantly of all, none of my Great Big Sea. *^_^*;;

As part of this entire process, though, I also took the time to update the album art on some of the albums--especially the filk ones that weren't otherwise in the iTunes online library. And for giggles, because I could, I found a tool that converts mp3 files to audiobook files, and have tried this out on the ripped mp3's from my purchased box set of the audiobook version of Storm Front--the one read by James Marsters. We'll see if this works okay!

So now I'm dumping the entire collection down to DVD-ROM before I *touch wood* finally sync up the iPod with iTunes on this new machine. I've got four DVD's worth of music and related files like album art and the like. Over 14GB. Wow.

After that, I'm going to move on to verifying that the move of my mail over to Winnowill has worked correctly. I'm pretty sure the mail is all okay at this point, though I do have a few nitpicky challenges involved with reinstating all the mail-sorting rules I was using in Outlook. And my various Outlook Notes haven't survived the move, either. Googling around finds me no immediately useful solution, so I suspect I may just have to re-transcribe them into the Mac mail client.

More annoying, though, is that I have also discovered that the sync software I purchased to sync up with my frob is essentially useless. Not only does it not sync email, it also fails to actually convert the files back and forth between the formats for Pocket Word and Pocket Excel and the formats for the actual versions. This is less of a problem for Word than it is for Excel, for me. I do all my writing in RTF format anyway, and I can open that straight up in Pocket Word. But I also use a lot of spreadsheets for tracking word counts, and I don't have a solution yet for those.

I'm seriously considering whether I'm also going to have to check out the competitor product, PocketMac. It seems to be the only other available solution for my needs. Bah.

Also still to do: get Pixelmator and see if it's the graphics program I want, and go through iCal and make sure that the duplicate alert problem I've got is fixed. More tomorrow, when I have more brain.

It's an easy mistake to make--you're probably thinking of her storm-themed trilogy.

But yeah, go check out the link and see if the site will actually do overseas shipping. James Marsters actually did read the first four Dresden novels, and I've been thinking about getting 2-4. Heck, if worst comes to worst and they won't ship to you, maybe you and I could work something out where I get the CDs and I ship them to you. :)